The Invisible Victims

The nation's first comprehensive health and social service center for women "infected and affected" by AIDS is just about to be born. February, Iris House, named for AIDS activist and poet Iris de la Cruz, opens its doors in New York's depressed East Harlem.

"The approach embodied in this facility will set a precedent and be a model for the entire nation," says Ruth Messinger, Manhattan borough president. "Women together, struggling against ignorance and fear, have offered us a vision of a better way to engage the difficult and frightening questions that surround HIV infection." The center offers a broad spectrum of services including legal advocacy, psychological counseling, child care, housing referrals, and job referrals.

Until now, women have been either overlooked or miscast in the AIDS epidemic. Research studies, treatment trials, and diagnostic definitions have largely ignored them as patients, or dwelled on them as agents of HIV virus transmission to a fetus or to a man - though studies now show that infected men are 10 times more likely to spread the virus through sex than the other way around.

Because more than 90 percent of the reported full-blown AIDS cases have occurred in men, the assumption has been that it's not really a "woman's disease." But in the US., women now comprise the fastest growing group of people with AIDS - and this was before the government expanded the definition of the disease in January to include medical conditions more typical of women's pattern of infection. The definition also affects eligibility for disability payments and other health and social benefits.

"It's ironic that women who have long known what was wrong with them are celebrating the fact that they are now allowed to call their disease AIDS," said Terry McGovern, director of the HIV Law Project in New York City, who helped push for the new ruling.

As of December 1992, some 27,000 women had been diagnosed with AIDS, while at least 150,000 were HIV-infected. Under the expanded definition, the reported number of new cases could double over the next year.

Women's health activists realized long ago there are some services they can't wait around for the government to offer. Three years ago a small support group of women with AIDS began meeting at the Manhattan borough president's office to share concerns and information about the disease. The new center is an outgrowth of this monthly gathering.